Back to Methuselah eBook

Chaos had come again. The first effect was exhilarating:
we had the runaway child’s sense of freedom before
it gets hungry and lonely and frightened. In
this phase we did not desire our God back again.
We printed the verses in which William Blake, the most
religious of our great poets, called the anthropomorphic
idol Old Nobodaddy, and gibed at him in terms which
the printer had to leave us to guess from his blank
spaces. We had heard the parson droning that God
is not mocked; and it was great fun to mock Him to
our hearts’ content and not be a penny the worse.
It did not occur to us that Old Nobodaddy, instead
of being a ridiculous fiction, might be only an impostor,
and that the exposure of this Koepenik Captain of
the heavens, far from proving that there was no real
captain, rather proved the contrary: that, in
short, Nobodaddy could not have impersonated anybody
if there had not been Somebodaddy to impersonate.
We did not see the significance of the fact that on
the last occasion on which God had been ’expelled
with a pitchfork,’ men so different as Voltaire
and Robespierre had said, the one that if God did
not exist it would be necessary to invent him, and
the other that after an honest attempt to dispense
with a Supreme Being in practical politics, some such
hypothesis had been found quite indispensable, and
could not be replaced by a mere Goddess of Reason.
If these two opinions were quoted at all, they were
quoted as jokes at the expense of Nobodaddy.
We were quite sure for the moment that whatever lingering
superstition might have daunted these men of the eighteenth
century, we Darwinians could do without God, and had
made a good riddance of Him.

THE VICEROYS OF THE KING OF KINGS

Now in politics it is much easier to do without God
than to do without his viceroys and vicars and lieutenants;
and we begin to miss the lieutenants long before we
begin to miss their principal. Roman Catholics
do what their confessors advise without troubling God;
and Royalists are content to worship the King and
ask the policeman. But God’s trustiest
lieutenants often lack official credentials. They
may be professed atheists who are also men of honor
and high public spirit. The old belief that it
matters dreadfully to God whether a man thinks himself
an atheist or not, and that the extent to which it
matters can be stated with exactness as one single
damn, was an error: for the divinity is in the
honor and public spirit, not in the mouthed credo
or non credo. The consequences of this
error became grave when the fitness of a man for public
trust was tested, not by his honor and public spirit,
but by asking him whether he believed in Nobodaddy
or not. If he said yes, he was held fit to be
a Prime Minister, though, as our ablest Churchman
has said, the real implication was that he was either
a fool, a bigot, or a liar. Darwin destroyed this
test; but when it was only thoughtlessly dropped,